Category: MOOCs

Not only am I racing to the end of the semester right now; I’m also racing to the end of the “MOOC book,” Invasion of the MOOCs: The Promises and Perils of Massive Online Open Courses. With any luck, I’ll be able to blog about the release date soon.

In the meantime, I wanted to write up a post that is sort of/kind of notes for MOOC things I’m reading and planning on writing about soon.

First off, the “big news” about MOOCs lately is the fall of Sebastian Thrun. This CHE piece covers most of it with links, “Academics to Udacity Founder: Told Ya.” The upshot of it is there’s a lot of academic schadenfreude being savored over Thrun’s admission that MOOCs don’t work like he had hoped. For Invasion of the MOOCs, I’m going to write a brief afterword that tries to touch on some of the things that have happened since this project first got started and a lot of these essays were originally written. In brief, I think the lesson about Thrun is more complicated than “told ya.”

The fact is Thrun dramatically over-promised the potential of MOOCs, either out of a huckster’s desire for headlines, pure hubris, naiveté about what it takes to teach at risk students online, or (most likely) some combination of all of the above. But that just means that Thrun was wrong about what he thought (or hoped) would be the use of MOOCs; that doesn’t mean MOOCs are automatically now useless. After all, when personal computers were first being contemplated back in the 1970s, folks thought that one of the main reasons why people would want a home computer was to replace boxes of recipe cards. Frequently the original purpose of a technology turns out to be flat-out wrong– and of course the original MOOC folks would have never made such ridiculous promises anyway.

Speaking of which: Audrey Watters has a handy article here, “Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2013: MOOCs and Anti-MOOCs.” It includes a nice “history” of the past year, a ton of links, some great quotes, etc. I thought this was useful:

Barely a week has gone by this year without some MOOC-related news. Much like last year, massive open online courses have dominated ed-tech conversations.

But if 2012 was, as The New York Times decreed, the year of the MOOC, 2013 might be described as the year of the anti-MOOC as we slid down that Gartner Hype Cycle from the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” and into the “Trough of Disillusionment.” For what it’s worth,Gartner pegged MOOCs at the peak back in July, while the Horizon Report says they’re still on the horizon. Nevertheless the head of edX appeared on the Colbert Report this year, and the word “MOOC” entered the Oxford Online Dictionary – so whether you think those are indications of peak or trough or both or neither, it seems the idea of free online university education has hit the mainstream.

Besides being smart, that just gives you a taste of the links/connections to other MOOC articles out there. Good stuff.

I haven’t spent a lot of time looking at this yet, but the MOOC Research Initiative (MRI) “is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as part of a set of investments intended to explore the potential of MOOCs to extend access to postsecondary credentials through more personalized, more affordable pathways.” I do know that they sponsored a conference this past weekend. Jim Groom has a blog post about it here (via Stephen Downes) and Inside Higher Ed has an article here called “Confirming the MOOC Myth.” Judging by the comments and some of what Downes had to say about a study from the University of Pennsylvania that found that there’s not a lot of engagement in MOOCs (shocking!), sounds like there are a lot of different views of the still moving future of MOOCs.

Finally (and also a link from Stephen Downes’ site) comes “MOOCs: the C***** word is the problem!” by Donald Clark. His basic point is that the problem with MOOCs is the notion that it’s a “course” and it ought to be thought more about content. This is more or less what my contribution to Invasion of the MOOCs is about, and I know mine is not the only piece in that book that makes a similar argument. So Clark is in good company, I suppose.

I’ve been traveling a lot lately, so my reading, writing, and editing about MOOCs (and pretty much everything else) has been pretty scattered to say the least. This is a post I’ve been writing off and on for about a week and a half, for example.

I think the most interesting development(s) are summed up within this CHE piece, “The MOOC ‘Revolution’ May Not Be as Disruptive as Some Had Imagined.” It’s mostly a recap of some of the ways that MOOCs have stumbled as of late– the shelved bill in California, the lack of interest in the program at Colorado State where students could have taken a MOOC for credit, etc.– but there were two other points I thought were interesting and worthy of sharing/remembering for later. First, this:

All three providers [that is, Coursera, Udacity, and EdX] have indicated that they are not satisfied to operate at the fringes of the higher-education system. They want to be a part of online education in the main. But given the institutional monopoly on credit-granting privileges, that means catering to colleges rather than attempting to undermine them.

“Credits are the coin of the academic realm,” says Russell Poulin, deputy director for research and analysis at the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education’s Cooperative for Educational Technologies. “And if that’s where the coins are, these companies are going to drive there.”

To that end, the products and services those providers could supply colleges in the future have little to do with MOOCs. Rather, they resemble products and services that technology vendors like Blackboard and Pearson have been selling to colleges for years—”many of which,” says Mr. Horn, “are not disruptive at all.”

And this:

The closest Udacity has come to bringing MOOC-like economies of scale to the credit world is a proposed partnership with the Georgia Institute of Technology on a master’s degree in computer science. Over the next three years, the program aims to enroll 10,000 students, each of whom will have the opportunity to earn a degree for less than $7,000—a fraction of the cost of a traditional master’s program. To save on faculty costs, Udacity would hire “course assistants” to help Georgia Tech instructors with “academic and nonacademic tasks,” according to a contract between the company and the Georgia Tech Research Corporation.

But that plan, too, could encounter institutional challenges. Benjamin Flowers, chair of the university’s graduate curriculum committee, says he and his colleagues have “at no point been given, to review, any written proposal for any new graduate degree program.”

Officials seem to have circumvented the committee by casting the Udacity partnership as a “modification” of an existing computer-science master’s program, says Mr. Flowers. He says his committee is not done with the Udacity proposal, and may raise the issue in the university’s faculty senate when the body reconvenes this fall.

The New York Times has a slightly more upbeat version take on the Georgia Tech computer science quasi-MOOC, “Master’s Degree Is New Frontier of Study Online.” And I recall reading someplace Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng saying that they were just an “online education platform company.”

Besides being a long LOONNNGGG way away from the initial vision of companies like Coursera and Udacity to educate the masses in South Africa or find untapped geniuses in Mongolia, Coursera is entering a market that is already pretty crowded (e.g., Blackboard, Pearson, etc.) with a platform that is frankly not very good.

As far as Georgia Tech’s computer science program goes: let’s just table for a moment the question as to whether or not this kind of program is a “good idea” in the larger sense– that is, can such programs be effective, what are the implications relative to higher education as we know it now and into the future, etc., etc. And let’s just assume that the academic bureaucracy at Georgia Tech eventually approves this MA program, though the CHE article makes that sound like it’s not exactly a sure thing.

It seems to me the hype for this online MOOC program sounds a lot like what I recall reading about online programs  a dozen years ago– that is, students from all over the world will enroll and they will prove to be profitable. That turned out to not be the case then, and it’s difficult for me to imagine how this will be any different with this program.

For one thing, as I have blogged about before, there seems to me to be a serious disconnect between the audience of students/users that are actually enrolling in MOOCs and the students/users that the MOOC providers want.  While the people enrolling in MOOCs are typically folks looking for free personal enrichment and edutainment and not for some kind of degree or credential, this Georgia Tech MOOC aims to attract students who want an advanced degree and who are willing to pay for it. That’s a little attracting would-be diners with a McDonalds but then trying to sell that same clientele $20 entrees.

For another, I think it’s still too expensive. No offense to the fine folks at Georgia Tech (a great school for sure), but if I was seeking an MA in computer science and I was willing to spend somewhere between $6,000 and $10,000 for it, then I’d probably attend a program where I was going to interact with faculty (and not “course assistants”), where I was going to have something akin to a “real” graduate experience with small classes and lots of interaction with faculty and fellow students, and where I thought there might be some chance at employment at the other end. Fundamentally, this is why students study in programs like the ones at EMU, even when those programs are online: because of geographic proximity and because of costs.

So I think we’ll be reading in a year about how this program has failed to meet expectations. Then again, my predictions are often wrong.

In other news:

“The Classroom Experience Re-Imagined,” by Mohamed Noor, which is from some Duke University magazine.  I took part of Noor’s “Introduction to Genetics and Evolution” MOOC last fall/early winter; I thought it was a pretty good textbook or supplement to an actual intro to genetics class. It turns out that was his intention:

MOOCs allow recorded video lectures to be presented asynchronously with interactive features (e.g., “in-video quizzes”). Students determine how well they understand the material through various assessments online. They can interact with other students through online discussion forums. Hence, well-constructed MOOCs offer significantly more than watching videos in, say, YouTube or Khan Academy.

For me, the “flipped class” concept is a conceptual extension of what happens in small humanities courses. My Duke students use my MOOC as a means of mastering the basic content before coming to my classroom. The video format allows me to tailor the material and make it far more approachable than through just textbook reading, and the online assessments help the students identify gaps in their comprehension. I add a question to the daily pre-class quiz specifically asking students to report concepts they found confusing. The night before the class, I receive direct feedback on student performance and understanding related to the basic class material.

Nowhere in this piece does Noor talk about the MOOC as credit in and of itself, but I suspect he wouldn’t be crazy about the idea.

“California Puts MOOC Bill on Ice” from CHE. This is old news; basically, a bill in California that would have required state schools to award credit for MOOCs and other “nonuniversity providers” has been shelved.

I don’t know if I’ve linked to this before or not, but here’s MOOC List, which is (surprise-surprise!) a list of MOOCs.

Forbes has had a couple of kind of wacky MOOC pieces as of late. A few weeks ago, Doug Guthrie (who is a business professor at George Washington University) wrote “MOOCs are Toast or at Least Should Be.” He seems to be suggesting the downfall of the corporate xMOOC in favor of “Big Data:”

Now don’t confuse MOOCs with online learning, which isn’t going to disappear and isn’t a failure. Online learning in all its many flavors will fundamentally transform higher education, bridging distances and creating access in ways that have not been possible before and have not been imagined yet.

Big Data in the online learning space will give institutions the predictive tools they need to improve learning outcomes for individual students. By designing a curriculum that collects data at every step of the student learning process, universities can address student needs with customized modules, assignments, feedback and learning trees in the curriculum that will promote better and richer learning.

I’m not completely sure what he means by “Big Data,” but you get the idea.

Meanwhile, there’s this Forbes piece by Jeanne Meister, “How MOOCs Will Revolutionize Corporate Learning And Development.” She gets some of the history of MOOCs wrong and I’m not sure Khan Academy is the source of the so-called “flipped classroom” either, but I think she has a point: MOOCs may prove to be most useful for teaching things outside of/beyond the realm of institutional credit.

Last but not least, there were a couple of articles about a feminist MOOC.  When I first read about this, I thought what was being described sounded not really that different from the first wave of “cMOOCs” about connectivity, community, flattening hierarchy, etc. But as the Inside Higher Ed article “Feminist Anti-MOOC” describes it, the “distributed open collaborative course or DOCC (pronounced “dock”)” is more than that. Here’s a quote:

The DOCC aims to challenge MOOC thinking about the role of the instructor, about the role of money, about hierarchy, about the value of “massive,” and many other things. The first DOCC will be offered for credit at 16 colleges this coming semester, as well in a more MOOC-style approach in which videos and materials are available online for anyone.

“We’re not saying bad bad MOOCs, but we’re asking how else we might innovate,” said Anne Balsamo, co-facilitator of the DOCC and dean of the School of Media Studies at the New School.

and….

So each week, a video presentation — typically a discussion with one, two or three thinkers about feminism and technology — will set a theme for the week. The first week’s video will feature Balsamo in a discussion with Judy Wajcman, a sociologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science whose 1991 book Feminism Confronts Technology led many feminist thinkers to focus more on technology issues. That video is designed to provide a historic overview. Subsequent weeks will feature discussions about more focused topics — feminism, technology and labor one week; feminism, technology and sexuality another, and so forth.

At participating colleges, professors will base their own courses on each weekly theme, sharing course materials and assignments, but customizing them for their own students. The courses will vary, as some are undergraduate and some are graduate, and the institutions (see list at right) vary widely by mission and geography — including institutions in Australia, Britain, Canada and the United States. The class sizes will be between 15 and 30 students each, decidedly non-massive. “There is another pedagogical commitment here,” Balsamo said. “Who you learn with is as important as what you learn. Learning is a relationship, not just something that can be measured by outcomes or formal metrics.”

Kind of interesting– I could see a model like this working for first year writing too, either as a sort of “intra-MOOC” for a program or, like this one, to share ideas, lectures, materials, and discussions between institutions.

It sure seems like there’s been a swing in both the education media and the main stream media against MOOCs as of late– that is, from what once seemed to me to be a blind faith of MOOCs being the next best thing, it seems like we’ve swung lately into a sort of a MOOCs are evil vein. I have links and miscellaneous thoughts after the break, but before I get there, let me suggest two important and frequently ignored “truths” about MOOCs to keep in mind as you browse through these and almost anything else about MOOCs, especially polemics about MOOCs.

Truth #1:  MOOCs and Online Education are NOT the same thing.  MOOCs are of course online, but most online courses are not MOOCs, even though almost every MSM article I read about MOOCs (and a lot in The Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed) collapse “MOOC” and “online education” into one thing. Furthermore, despite Daphne Koller’s belief that she and other MOOC enthusiasts at elite institutions invented online education with MOOCs, online courses have been around for a couple decades. And I’m not just talking about online universities of frankly dubious merit like the University of Phoenix. I’ve been teaching online at EMU for at least eight years now (not massive ones– 20 to 15 students), and I know online classes were happening here long before that. In fact, about one third of all college students are taking at least some courses online right now.

So when Obama said in one paragraph in an hour long speech the other day about how he wants to try to reinvent higher education by “testing new approaches to shorten the path to a degree or blending teaching with online learning to help students master material and earn credits in less time,” that doesn’t automatically mean MOOCs, despite what some folks (including Chait and a few others I link to below) might say. Of course, I’m not sure Obama really knows what he meant.

Truth #2: Broadly speaking, there are MOOCs and then there are MOOCs.Here’s how George Siemens, one of the Canadians credited with pioneering MOOCs in the first place, describes the difference between “cMOOCs” and “xMOOCs:”

Largely lost in the conversation around MOOCs is the different ideology that drives what are currently two broad MOOC offerings: the connectivist MOOCs (cMOOCs?) that I have been involved with since 2008 (with people like Stephen Downes, Jim Groom, Dave Cormier, Alan Levine, Wendy Drexler, Inge de Waard, Ray Schroeder, David Wiley, Alec Couros, and others) and the well-financed MOOCs by Coursera and edX (xMOOCS?).

Our MOOC model emphasizes creation, creativity, autonomy, and social networked learning. The Coursera model emphasizes a more traditional learning approach through video presentations and short quizzes and testing. Put another way, cMOOCs focus on knowledge creation and generation whereas xMOOCs focus on knowledge duplication. I’ve spoken with learners from different parts of the world who find xMOOCs extremely beneficial as they don’t have access to learning materials of that quality at their institutions. xMOOCs scale, they have prestigious universities supporting them, and they are well-funded. It is quite possible that they will address the “drill and grill” instructional methods that is receiving some criticism.

I’m not crazy about the terminology of “cMOOC” versus “xMOOC,” but you get the idea. The distinction is “connectivist” MOOCs are about open source tools, community, questioning the current model of higher ed, and not about credit, and “xMOOCs” are about containment, stand and deliver presentation, and for credit– or at least (hopefully) for money, though Coursera et al still haven’t figured out how they are going to make all that money. Siemens described running his MOOC “off the side of his desk” in conjunction with a more traditional course, while Coursera and edX are major corporate enterprises that are trying to be “courses” in and of themselves. cMOOCs were more about the open education movement and xMOOCs are more about re-inscribing the values of higher education as they exists– which is why, in my view, there is such an emphasis by the commercial MOOC providers on “elite” universities as content providers.

The distinction is important because polemic views about MOOCs usually depend on one of the different (and polemic) definitions of what a MOOC is in the first place.  Oddly, it reminds me of “grunge.” There was a documentary back in the mid-1990s called Hype! that recounted the way the Seattle music “scene” that became known as grunge went from a rebellious, counter-cultural thing to the mainstream of music and fashion via MTV, Nirvana, etc.. I wouldn’t say that the earlier scene was automatically more authentic than the one co-opted by the MSM, but the definitions, purposes, and values of “grunge” certainly changed once it got notice outside of dumpy little places in the Pacific Northwest.

My point is be very very careful of “collapsed” definitions of MOOCs. For example, Jonathan Rees’ writes this near the beginning of his Slate piece “The MOOC Racket: Widespread online-only higher ed will be disastrous for students—and most professors.”

MOOC stands for “massive open online course.” The term was coined by a group of Canadian academics in 2008 to represent a recently invented type of online class that depends upon small group interactions for most of the instruction. More recently, three instructors in the Stanford University computer science department appropriated that term to start two separate private education companies, Udacity and Coursera. Despite being free of charge, the MOOCs that these firms offer bear a more-than-passing resemblance to ordinary college classes—except they are delivered over the Internet to tens of thousands of people at once.

See what I mean? The “group of Canadians” were the same ones trying to make a distinction between their cMOOCs and Coursera and Udacity’s xMOOCs in the first place, and Rees basically bundles them all up into one group and calls them all bad, I assume because what he really is against are the xMOOCs of the world.

Okay, more after the jump.

Continue reading “Truths about MOOCs, Rees v Chait, and a bunch of other MOOC article links”

What I really need to do is get back to some editing work on the collection of essays about the rapid rise of MOOCs, a collection I’m putting together with Charlie Lowe and that I hope will be out (both in paper and electronically) in fall. More on that coming soon, I am sure. But before I do that, I have been meaning to blog about a couple of articles/bits of news that I’ve come across in the last couple of weeks that just leave me, well, surprised.

First, “Coursera Snags $43-Million in Venture Capital” in their “second round” of financing, this on top of the $22 million it raised last year.  Here’s a link to Coursera’s blog post about all this. The only income Coursera has generated so far (according to this CHE piece) is through it’s “Signature Track” program.  As I blogged about here, it’s basically a way of taking proctored exams and otherwise getting your Coursera class to “count.” The Duke Composition MOOC allowed for this. According to CHE:

The program has generated more than $800,000 since January, a portion of which has gone to the universities that offered the Signature Track MOOCs on the Coursera platform. So far, Signature Track is the company’s “only significant source of revenue,” said Nikki Sequeira, a spokeswoman, via e-mail.

I realize the whole MOOC commerce thing is a moving target, and I know absolutely nothing about VC investing. But given everything we know about MOOCs so far– that there doesn’t seem to be an audience that is willing to pay anything for them— and given that Coursera keeps changing what business it is in (are they providing college credit? training? data for employers? taking on LMS companies like Blackboard?), it sure seems to me these investors would have been better off buying swampland someplace.

Then, on the very same day, CHE reported “Blackboard Announces New MOOC Platform.” Here’s a quote:

Blackboard, a company that makes software that many colleges use to run their classroom and online courses, announced on Wednesday that it was expanding its support for MOOCs, though it is relatively late to the much-talked-about trend of massive open online courses.

“We watched really carefully, and we thought about doing something” sooner, said Ray Henderson, president of Blackboard’s teaching and learning division, in an interview this week. “This is one of those times when we said this is a watch and develop, not jump on it.”

So basically, Coursera is trying to migrate into the LMS business and Blackboard is trying to migrate into the MOOC “business” (which isn’t really a business because there’s no money in it, but it is something that everyone is doing now).

Oy.

By the way, this is probably as good as place as any to point out I wrote a book chapter about using blogs (specifically WordPress) to avoid things like Blackboard and Coursera.  It’s called “Blogs as an Alternative to Course Management Systems: Public, Interactive Teaching with a Round Peg in a Square Hole” and it’s in Designing Web-Based Applications for 21st Century Writing Classrooms. I have a long section in that chapter subtitled “What’s Wrong With Course Management Systems?” One of these days, I’ll post a bunch of that here.

I think I came across the CHE’s “A University’s Offer of Credit for a MOOC Gets No Takers” via someone’s twitter feed the other day. To me, it’s an important article to think about in terms of MOOCs and money.  Here’s a quote from the opening paragraphs:

It was big news last fall when Colorado State University-Global Campus became the first college in the United States to grant credit to students who passed a MOOC, or massive open online course.

For students, it meant a chance to get college credit on the cheap: $89, the cost of the required proctored exam, compared with the $1,050 that Colorado State charges for a comparable three-credit course.

That is a big discount.

Yet almost a year after Global Campus made the announcement, officials are still waiting for their first credit bargain-hunters.

Not one student has taken the university up on its offer.

A lot of the article downplays this failure, pointing out that this particular class was targeted to a small market, it’s early in the history of MOOCs, the demographics of MOOCs are mostly older students, etc. In other words, it sort of concludes “but don’t worry, the MOOC revolution is still coming!”

Three brief thoughts:

Something similar happened with “traditional” online classes.  I am simultaneously too lazy and too busy to find the citation, but way back when the end of the university as we know was going to be brought about by more traditional and reasonably sized online classes. One of the major publishers decided they were going to offer courses like first year writing for credit directly, bypassing universities entirely. In other words, instead of taking a section of first year writing at EMU or even at a community college to transfer to EMU, students would take their class directly from Cengage (or whoever).  There were articles about how this was the end of the university, etc., and once again, no one signed up for these courses. The whole “take a course direct from the publisher” thing closed up within a year.

MOOCs have a serious audience problem.  “xMOOC” enthusiasts (e.g., Coursera, Udacity, and university administrators looking at dollar signs) keep arguing that they’re trying to extend access to education at a lower cost (and larger volume!) to young people who otherwise wouldn’t have access to college because of money, because of geography, etc. The problem– as this article points out– is that the vast majority of people participating in MOOCs right now aren’t these people; rather, they are older people who already have college degrees and who are taking MOOCs for “edutainment.”

This represents a complete miss of the audience Udacity and Coursera actually want and need to make any money at this. People taking MOOCs for edutainment are not going to pay anything for credit hours because they don’t want or need them.

Actual college students are not interested in cheap courses that might (or might not) transfer; they’re interested in a credential. In other words, while the gainfully employed and educated 30-something out there in the “first world” might take a MOOC about computer science or nutrition or whatever just because its interesting, 18-year-olds who want a college education won’t.  They’re not coming to places like EMU to take a class or two because it’s “edutaining;” they come to places like EMU go get a complete degree that they can leverage as experience and as a requirement for a job and/or graduate school.

College students are very specific in their goals.  They might not know what they want to major in and they might not know what they want to do after they get a degree, but they all are here for that credential/diploma/seal of approval. In fact, I would say that one of the more common reasons why students drop out is they come to the realization after a year or so worth of classes that they actually aren’t interested in a degree (though a lot of those students end up coming back to college a few years later).

In contrast, MOOC students are just kind of curious and looking for something to do that they find interesting and fulfilling. If you asked 100 college students if they would be doing all the work of college classes if there was no credential awarded at the end– that is, if they would just be doing all of this “just because”– I’d bet you that 98 of them would say “heck no!” In contrast, if you asked 100 MOOC students if they expected some kind of credential/diploma/seal of approval as a result of the work they put into the MOOC, I’d bet you that 98 of them would say “heck no!”

One closely related point here (three and a half points?): I’m not sure that the cost of tuition matters that much to most college students (and/or their parents). Of course it matters some. Cost of attendance is a factor students and parents have to consider, I think it costs way too much to go to college, and I think the U.S. would be dramatically better off in all sorts of ways if our society made public higher education free.

But even with all the attention rising tuition has received in the mainstream media in the last couple of years, it is clear that cost of attendance is not the primary decision about applying to and attending a particular university. If it was the main factor, then places like EMU and Washtenaw Community College would be turning students away and places like the more expensive U of Michigan just down the road would have to do all it could do to fill seats. Enrollment at EMU is up, but the U of M still turns away about two-thirds of its applicants.

I’m not enrolled/participating in any MOOCs right now, I think pretty much for the first time in about a year. I’m busy with summer stuff (expect a gardening post soon), upcoming travel and other MOOC writing/editing things. There are plenty of  options to choose from on Coursera’s web site right now– including a course called “Introduction to Public Speaking” (and how exactly would that work?)– though I think the next one of these I’m going to take is going to be from Udacity (or someone else) and about something I know very little about (like math).

But I still wanted to post about a few of the links I’ve come across in the last couple of weeks. As has been the case before, this is mostly for me to come back to later on and it is not in a particular order– roughly chronological, I guess.

Continue reading “Yet another miscellaneous MOOC link round-up”